Jose Padua

The name of this poem is Dong of the Dead.
It is my attempt to cash in quickly
on the literary zombie craze by
writing the first literary zombie
porn novel in verse. I am writing it
while sitting in the  back of a pickup
truck.

 

The poem is a pornographic labor
of love and it begins like this: “There’s no
going back—once you’ve been fucked by a dead
guy.” It continues with a zombie wind
blowing over wet living human flesh,
so electric with the scent of death it
doesn’t know how not to move, how not to
stay dead, how not to be hot, how not to
be carnal, how not to spend all the long
dirty nights of dead souls.

 

I’d been walking
on the side of the highway for nearly
an hour, strange words in my head, when these guys
in a truck stopped. The guy riding shotgun
turned his head toward the back of the truck and
I hopped in.

 

A brief description: it’s long.
It has to be. After all, this is porn.
The plot: not much—you don’t come here for the
story, which doesn’t mean allegory
is out of the picture. For example,
the zombies represent the oligarchs,
the landed gentry, the greedy wealthy,
the robber barons who through all the
centuries have held our faces down, have
told us to keep sucking, have told us we
were beautiful so keep sucking, have told
us we were the best generation so
keep sucking. But above all, they’re dead
beings with big dicks.

 

The truck has turned off
the highway. Now I can hear the sound of
the radio coming from inside the
pickup truck. It’s tuned to a spot between
two stations: static, lines of news stories,
gulps of old pop songs.

 

And now for the zombies,
a musical interlude: Bach, not black
metal, not neo-Goth, nor cuddle-core
for the purpose of being painfully,
obviously ironic, because this
is literary and is not meant to
be edgy, trendy, underground, transgressive,
because I am here to make money, and
the zombies fuck the women as Bach’s Lute
Suite in G minor plays. So, as you read
imagine this: Bach, the elegant, sometimes
mournful lute; and death-gray-colored huge zombie
dicks plunging into the amorous,
enraptured, voluptuous, insatiable
orifices of the living.

 

It’s hard
to write, keep pen on paper, as we ride
these rough back roads, as we go where I don’t
know. When I knocked on the rear windshield no
one looked back. When I shout a question the
static is all I get back.

 

Treatise, premise:
I am writing this poem because porn is
disappearing from our lives, because all
around us are fake breasts, fake styles of
living, fake sex, fake people, we may as
well be dead, we may as well be zombies and

 

The name of this poem is Dong of the Dead.
The name of this dong is Dead of the Poem.
The name of this dong is Poem of the Dead.
The name of the dead is Poem of the Dong.

 

And the truck stops by a rotting tree stump,
and the men step out as easily as
tree frogs predicting stormy weather. So
dong you, dong your mother, dong the singers

 

of cheap songs, dong your warm hats in winter,
dong those long sentimental walks along
the shore when your beaver is hanging out
and your dong is covered with ocean foam,

 

dong all the emperors of frozen treats,
dong the wrong way signs there is no wrong way,
dong these leaves, dong this grass, these knives, these long
loose motions because in the end, this is

 

how we live, spending these dark days alone,
sipping tea, reading the great works of zom-
bie literature, knowing that one day
everything will be dead, everything will

 

be war and envy and the waving of
flags and film of the newly dead. So stay
dead, my friends—this is my take, this is my
spin, on these moans, this breathing, this pace of

 

things knowing that one day this will all be
wet, sweaty, and oozing. Ah yes, my friends,
that’s what it will be, in the end, all still,
all static. And oozing, oozing, oozing.

 

-Jose Padua

Photo by Jose Padua. Jose Padua is co-author of the blog Shenandoah Breakdown.

Poetry